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A review by a_here
In Love by Alfred Hayes
4.0
"She looked out of the window of the cab then at the falling and spinning snowflakes, and the dark store fronts, securely bolted against the night, and she said ... isn't it beautiful sometimes, and I asked her what was beautiful sometimes, and she said: The snow, and everything. / So that there must have been, for her, a momentary pang of something lovely, something that the hush of the whiteness and the somnolent heat of the cab gave her. Perhaps it was the anticipation ... when one is in a taxi with a stranger who is about to be transfigured into a lover, ... and the cab itself seems to exist inside a magical circle of quiet heat and togetherness and motion: and, I suppose, for that moment, it is beautiful: the snow and everything."
Chapter 3, p 20-21
"And was this, we say, later, when it's over, really us? But it's impossible! How could that fool, that impossible actor, ever have been us? How could we have been that posturing clown? Who put that false laughter into our mouths? ... We have been hiding all the time; the events, that once were so real, happened to other people, who resemble us, imitators using our name ... but not us, surely not us, we wince thinking that it could ever possibly been us."
Chapter 3, p 31
"The only thing we haven't lost, I thought, is the ability to suffer. We're fine at suffering. But it's such noiseless suffering. We never disturb the neighbors with it. We collapse, but we collapse in the most disciplined way. That's us. That's certainly us. The disciplined collapsers. ... Your only vice, I thought, is yourself."
Chapter 5, p 62
Chapter 3, p 20-21
"And was this, we say, later, when it's over, really us? But it's impossible! How could that fool, that impossible actor, ever have been us? How could we have been that posturing clown? Who put that false laughter into our mouths? ... We have been hiding all the time; the events, that once were so real, happened to other people, who resemble us, imitators using our name ... but not us, surely not us, we wince thinking that it could ever possibly been us."
Chapter 3, p 31
"The only thing we haven't lost, I thought, is the ability to suffer. We're fine at suffering. But it's such noiseless suffering. We never disturb the neighbors with it. We collapse, but we collapse in the most disciplined way. That's us. That's certainly us. The disciplined collapsers. ... Your only vice, I thought, is yourself."
Chapter 5, p 62